Mourinho deploying his Madrid tactics at Old Trafford

It is the question that has coloured Jose Mourinho’s entire time at Manchester United – as well as much of his career beyond Old Trafford – and keeps coming back.

It is of course about how those sides attack, how the Portuguese sees that side of the game. The discussion arose again after the 1-0 defeat to Brighton, in what was yet another flat and frustrating display against a well-organised defence.

The defeat of course also forced all manner of other discussions that have punctuated Mourinho’s time at Old Trafford. He responded, fairly and emphatically – but the answer is also what makes United’s predicament all the more curious. It is the 2011-12 season at Real Madrid.

How can Mourinho’s attacking be questioned when this is the manager who put out the champions who still hold the Spanish league scoring record, an utterly rampant 121 goals in a single season?

How are all these things squared? Is it a great contradiction of his career, or should it lead to a more correct perception of how he works?

Mourinho is of course absolutely right to bring it up every time the question comes up, and he has regularly done so going right back to his second spell at Chelsea, but there was one specific time where his answer really stood out; where it went to really explaining the “why”.

It was in his first season with United, when he was interviewed by France Football.

“People sometimes confuse ball possession with the number of goals you score,” Mourinho explained.

“They forget that the aim is to always score and win. At Real, I had a team that broke the record for the number of goals scored in the history of the Spanish league: 121 goals in one season. It was the best in the world in terms of transition play, in terms of being effective in recovery, and then in terms of projecting the ball towards the goal.”

The last sentence maybe says a lot more than intended in this discussion, and essentially goes to Mourinho’s first principles as a coach.

It is why this 2011-12 season wasn’t actually a contradiction at all. It emphasises how it was a campaign all about countering, but taken to its furthest and finest extremes by the manager. They were excellent at winning the ball back then getting it up the pitch at breakneck speed, to the point opposition defences were broken by the time they got there.

“My team plays in this way or that way because that corresponds to the players that I have,” he told France Football. “I could have said to (Angel) Di Maria, who was faster than an arrow: ‘You do not dribble, you play with one touch, you pass the ball, because I do not want to lose’. But I prefer to play with the qualities that my players have.”

Not everyone at Real was completely enamoured with that pragmatism. Diego Torres’ controversial account of Mourinho’s time at the Bernabeu paints a much more complicated picture than the compelling simplicity of so many goals.

Among many other issues, the book details the complaints so many players had about an attacking system they felt actually constrained them. It elaborates at length about the problems they had when they didn’t get that early goal; when they faced sides that could sit deep for long.

This is when there were some performances more similar to United’s more trying days now. This also explains a statistical contradiction to the season. Even though that Real scored 121 goals and enjoyed eight games where they hit five or more, there were actually nine games – a quarter of the campaign – when they failed to score more than one. That does feel very high for a season that was otherwise so high-scoring.

And the principles behind that might be why United can still look so flat now.